The morning began with a hallway of half-hellos. Fluorescents woke one by one, coughing light into the office like old men clearing their throats. Rayan signed the visitor's register without looking up, the pen gliding as if it had already memorized his name. He could tell the day's weather from the way the reception printer wheezed—humid ink, paper curling at the corners. Small omens.
"Rayan," the receptionist called softly, pushing her voice across the desk like a folded note. "He's in. He asked for you."
"Of course he did," Rayan said, not unkindly, and set his tool case by his foot.
He waited at the threshold of the manager's glass room. The door was open. It always was—an invitation to be inspected. Inside, the boss stood over a desk that looked ironed. His suit belonged to another climate. He didn't lift his eyes; he arranged them.
"Camera eight," the boss said, tapping a printout that featured a single grainy still. "Wanders. And I reviewed your last ticket. You wrote 'monitored after reset for ten minutes.' Why ten? Why not twenty?"
"Because ten told me what I needed," Rayan replied. He kept his voice level, the dial turned to calm. "The fault showed under load. Ten minutes was load."
"Next time," the boss said, "make it twenty. And send me an email before you leave a site."
"I already do," Rayan said.
The boss looked up, surprised by the existence of facts.
A silence opened, neat at the edges like a well-cut hole. Rayan did not fill it. He let it stand, a small exhibit in the museum of their differences. The boss cleared his throat.
"Fine. There's also a concern with the stairwell coverage. I want more angle. I want—" He searched for a word that could be stacked. "—more discipline."
Rayan thought of the label he had written yesterday on the rooftop, the clean arc of the resealed box, the bolts aligned like buttons. He thought of discipline as the art of seeing, not the art of ordering. But he nodded.
"I'll see to it," he said.
"Good," the boss said, already glancing past him, as though the day had other throats to tighten. "You're dismissed."
Rayan stepped back into the corridor and felt his ribs widen to accept air. A junior tech—Adil, new enough to still be grateful for a ladder—caught up with him.
"He's in one of those moods," Adil whispered, leaning conspiracy into the space between them.
"He has many," Rayan said. "We have work."
They rode the service elevator—the one that confessed its age in gentle shudders—and shouldered through the door to the loading bay. Camera eight tilted over a painted line like a watcher with a stiff neck.
"You want me to pull the feed?" Adil asked, already half-turned toward the monitor.
"I want you to look," Rayan said. "Then we'll pull the feed."
Adil lifted his chin to the ceiling, the way kids used to look for constellations. Rayan waited. It mattered, this pause—teaching him the difference between screens and scenes.
"There's vibration in the mount," Adil said slowly. "See the tiny sway when the roller door moves? And the angle… it's catching too much ceiling."
"Good," Rayan said. "Let's fix the body before we fix the eyes."
They wheeled the ladder under the camera and climbed. Metal ticked as it accepted their weight. Rayan's hands read the bracket's fatigue—the looseness not from neglect but from time, which loosens everything, even stories. He tightened the bolts, then eased the dome to a kinder angle.
"Lock the door half-way," he called down.
Adil palmed the roller control. As the door landed in its throat with a soft clank, Rayan felt the mount barely breathe. He tightened once more, then clicked the housing shut. Below, the monitor drew a steadier world.
The boss arrived as if summoned by competence. His shoes did not have scuffs, which made Rayan trust them less.
"Well?" the boss said.
"Mount tightened. Angle corrected. Vibration reduced," Rayan said. "We'll monitor for twenty minutes."
The boss's eyes flickered—approval tried to rise and decided against it. "It would have been simpler to replace the unit," he said.
"It would have been simpler," Rayan agreed. "Not better."
A forklift beeped in reverse, painting the air with measured warning. The boss watched it as if it owed him money. "I need a report by three," he said, the kind of request that performs as instruction. "And revise the corridor plan. We're adding a unit."
"Adding?" Rayan asked. "Or relocating?"
"Adding. We need more coverage."
Rayan did not say: coverage is a word that hides a hunger. He only said, "I'll draft the angles."
After the boss left, Adil exhaled like a man who had been holding a plank too long. "You don't push back," he said, not accusing, only asking.
"I push in a direction that works," Rayan said. "Some fights leave things worse."
"And the sweets?" Adil grinned. "You still brought him some yesterday."
Rayan's mouth tugged. "Courtesy is cheaper than war."
They stood together, watching the monitor hold steady. People crossed the frame in weathered uniforms, in conversations shaped by hands more than words. Rayan set a timer for twenty minutes and wrote it down in his notebook, not to prove anything to anyone, but to keep a pact with himself.
The stairwell came next. The camera there told too honest a truth: steps worn deeper in the middle than the sides, a skid mark where someone had decided to learn a corner the hard way. Rayan studied the frame.
"If we raise the mount two brackets up and shift left," he said, pointing, "we'll get faces and feet. Right now we have shoulders and regret."
Adil laughed. "Write that in the report."
They unbolted the plate. Dust fell in small absolutions. Rayan's shoulder ached in the old way that had stopped surprising him; he welcomed it like a familiar knock. He steadied the drill. Two clean holes, anchors snug, plate flush. The new angle caught what it needed without stealing privacy.
"Why so careful?" Adil asked quietly while they gathered the dust with a brush. "No one else is."
"Because the things no one sees decide whether a day collapses," Rayan said. "And because I need to recognize myself when I write my name."
They ran the cable through a tidier route and labeled both ends with the simple poetry of numbers. On the landing, a maintenance worker paused with a mop and watched them as though they were performing a small, precise ballet.
"You the camera men?" he asked.
"Sometimes," Rayan said.
"Good," the man nodded. "Maybe people will stop using it like a race track."
"Cameras don't stop anything," Rayan said, not unkindly. "They remember."
"Memory's a kind of warning," the man replied, which pleased Rayan more than it should have.
By mid-afternoon, their twenty-minute vigil on camera eight had passed. The picture held. Rayan wrote the report with sentences that carried their own weight: no flourishes, no padded numbers, no apology. He included a plan for the corridor: one relocation, not an addition; a diagram with angles like arrows that pointed not at people but at patterns. He sent it, and for a moment the office felt as though it had heard him.
The boss pinged back with a single word: "Noted."
Adil hovered by his shoulder. "That's as close to 'thank you' as he gets, isn't it?"
"Today," Rayan said.
"Why doesn't it bother you more?"
Rayan considered. He could feel the answer rise from a deeper place than temper. "Because my work has to answer to the work," he said. "Not to his mood. If the picture is steady, I can sleep."
Adil looked at him as if committing the sentence to a future he didn't know he'd need.
Evening crept up the edges of windows. The office thinned, voices draining away like water finding level. Rayan closed the logbook and slid it into his bag. On his way out, he stopped at the glass door again. The boss sat under a lamp that made everything look interrogated—papers aligned, mouth a line that did not sign for parcels.
Rayan knocked. The boss gestured without looking up.
"I sent the corridor plan," Rayan said. "If we relocate instead of add, we'll reduce blind spots without clutter. It's cleaner and cheaper."
The boss scanned the diagram. His jaw moved once, like a man reluctantly admitting a coin had value. "Fine," he said. "Do it."
"Will do," Rayan said. He took a breath that tasted of printer ink and restraint. "And about the monitoring time—I wrote ten minutes because ten told me the truth. Today I wrote twenty because you asked. I'll keep writing what's needed, not what looks good."
The boss looked at him then, properly, as if a new shape had entered the room. "Just send the reports," he said, but the words were softer than the paper they fell on.
Rayan nodded. He could have left. Instead, he added, "You'll get them before end of day, like always."
There was a quiet recalibration in the man's gaze. Not approval—something less decorative. Recognition, perhaps. It was enough.
In the hallway, Adil waited with the comfortable patience of someone who had been taught to stay. "How'd it go?"
"Clean," Rayan said.
They walked out together into air that had forgotten to be hot. The sky was turning the color of a calm decision. Adil tucked his hands into his pockets.
"Sometimes I think the job is half cables, half people," he said.
"It's more than half people," Rayan said. "Cables obey. People rehearse."
Adil laughed, then sobered. "And you? What do you rehearse?"
Rayan thought of the rooftop last night, the way the city lit itself without asking permission. He thought of how anger always offered the first line and how he kept choosing a different script.
"Apologies I don't say aloud," he answered. "To myself, mostly. For the moments I wanted to be loud when quiet did the work."
They reached the van. Rayan opened the back and checked his tools with the ritual that soothed him: testers, crimpers, labels, cloth. The day had not spilled. The picture was steady.
As he climbed into the driver's seat, his phone buzzed with a new ticket—another stairwell, another wandering angle, another chance for the world to decide whether to be seen or to be guessed at. He felt the old ache flare and fade—shoulder, ribs, a murmur of a warning he would not yet translate. He set both hands on the wheel.
"Tomorrow?" Adil asked from the curb.
"Tomorrow," Rayan said, and the word felt like a gentle weight he could carry.
He pulled into the thinning street, and behind him, somewhere inside a glass room, a man read a report that did not flatter him but made his building safer. It was not gratitude, but it was a kind of peace. For now, it was enough.